Billie Piper wants her kids to avoid showbiz as teen pop career left her with anxiety

Billie Piper
Billie Piper was left stressed and anxious during her pop career as a teenager (Picture: Getty)

Billie Piper says she doesn’t want her kids to enter showbusiness after teen pop stardom left her stressed and anxiety riddled in her twenties.

The Secret Diary of a Call Girl star, now 37, became the youngest person in history to top the charts aged 15 with Because We Want To in 1998 before she went on to marry Chris Evans, 54, three years later.

Now she said the rollercoaster of fame dogged her for years before she caught her breath acting.

‘In my 20s a lot of my stress from that period was buried, and I still struggle to remember a lot of it. I don’t regret it. I love what I do and where I’m at personally.

‘But I certainly wouldn’t want my children to go that way. There’s an anxiety of me as a child that I probably on some levels smother my children with,’ said Piper, who has two sons, Winston, 11, and Eugene, 8, with second husband Laurence Fox. She had daughter Tallulah with musician Johnny Lloyd last year.

Her latest TV role in I Hate Suzie is certainly close to home as she plays a woman who shot to fame as a 15-year-old pop star before becoming an actor whose iPhone gets hacked.

Billie Piper
Billie topped the charts aged just 15 (Picture: PA)
Billie Piper stars in a bold, bracing, Sky original drama about the moment in life when the mask slips, asking if any of us can survive being well and truly ???known???. Suzie Pickles, has her life upended when she is hacked and pictures of her emerge in an extremely compromising position.
Billie stars in Sky drama I Hate Suzie (Picture: Sky/Des Willie)

‘I know exactly what that feels like and I’m sure it feeds into my performance. I’m only coming to terms with a lot of it right now,’ she admitted to the Radio Times.

Piper says of her character, ‘She’s not always likeable or a great mother. She’s quite often monstrous and hysterical and tightly wound. But that’s in all of us. I find it incredibly frustrating when I watch anything and I’m not get-ting that from a female character. It pisses me off.’

But the former Doctor Who star credits acting for helping her find happiness after she won an Olivier Award for Yerma at the Young Vic four years ago.

‘Yerma was a turning point for me because it came at a really good time in my life. I needed it. I don’t feel that imposter syndrome so much anymore. I felt it very strongly until Yerma, so that was a big moment for my confidence.’

Read the full interview in the Radio Times out now.

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